The present disclosure relates to techniques for automated detection and application of display device settings and, particularly, to detection of such settings in environments when negotiation protocols between video sources and displays provide unreliable information.
Although modern video display environments vary widely, many of them share several basic characteristics. A video source provides video data to a display device over a connection such as a wired cable or wireless communication link (collectively, “interconnect”). The video source and the display device each may support a variety of display formats. Various interconnect communication protocols have been developed not only to permit the devices to exchange video but also to permit the devices to exchange information about their capabilities. The High-Definition Multimedia Interface (“HDMI”) protocol is an example of one such protocol. The protocol supports exchange of Extended Display Identification Data (“EDID”), a data structure provided by a digital display to describe its display capabilities to a video source.
The inventors have determined that, in some circumstances, display devices do not provide accurate information regarding their capabilities via these protocols. For example, display devices that communicate with video sources according to an HDMI 1.4 protocol may not describe all display modes that the devices support, particularly high dynamic range formats and/or high definition formats such as 4K. When a video source selects a display format based solely on the device capabilities that are reported to it through the interconnect communication protocol, it is possible that the video source will select a display format that is sub-optimal for the device.
Compounding the problem, the inventors have determined that video sources sometimes select display modes that cannot be supported due to ambient interference. For example, many display formats involve use of data rates that approximate the frequencies of wireless transceivers, such as WiFi and Bluetooth transceivers (e.g. 2.4 GHz). At such frequencies, a poorly shielded interconnect may generate interference to such transceivers. A video source that selects a display format based solely on the reported capabilities of a device may select a format that cannot be supported due to such interference because, for example, a network connection that downloads video to be displayed on the device could not support a download bandwidth that would be necessary to support the video format in the presence of noise generated by the interconnect. Further, other ambient interference sources may operate intermittently, which, when coupled with interconnect generated noise, may cause certain display formats to be supportable at some times but be unsupportable at other times.
The inventors, therefore, have identified a need in the art for a technique to select a display format to provide to display devices that maximize display capabilities of a connected display device and are tailored for an operating environment in which the display is used.